Apple about to make move to Intel chips?

If the rumours are true, Apple may soon be moving over to Intel processors. Word has it that Apple will announce that it will phase out IBM's PowerPC processors, which it has used since 1994, in favour of Intel's x86 chips. Apple is expected to make this announcement at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday  but just wait and see, because this could turn out not to be true.

The change would require programmers to rewrite software to take full advantage of the new processor, and some experts have criticized the plan.

"If they actually do that, I will be surprised, amazed and concerned," said Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood. "I don't know that Apple's market share can survive another architecture shift. Every time they do this, they lose more customers" and more software partners."

Even if this comes to pass, don't expect a version of Mac OS X for PCs, though - the OS will still be Apple bound, but it is possible that some software hackers could reverse engineer the code to produce such an OS, but this is purely speculation.